Chapter 10

Ten

CALAIS TO PARIS

The compartment was full as the morning train continued our trip to Paris. Brodie sat across the way.

He had already left the room at the inn when I wakened, dressed, and then joined him in the small dining room of the inn. We ate with only a word or two that passed between us. However, more than once I looked up to find a frown on his face and that dark gaze watching me.

As now, then it was gone as he stared out the window of the compartment, conversations flowing around us in a mixture of French and English.

There were comments about the weather that had set in steadily as we left Calais, the unexpected delay of our departure, a family that had made the crossing from Dover, the mother attempting to soothe her restless young daughter who squirmed.

When would they arrive? What about Titou? Would grand-mére be there?

She eventually ran out of questions, laid her head on her mother's lap, and closed her eyes.

So very simple, I thought, to be a child and the only thought was of a beloved pet or one's grandmother.

We were soon pulling into the Gare du Nord station.

It was a central point of travel in France and beyond, and there were attendants who spoke both French and English. He secured a driver and gave him the address of the hotel where Sir Avery had made reservations for our stay.

I had stayed at the Hotel Westminster at the Rue De La Paix in the past as I returned from one of my trips abroad. It was built by the Duke of Westminster, an acquaintance of my great-aunt, in the style of an English manor house with rich dark woods, marble floors, and fresco ceilings, with suites and rooms in six stories that dominated 13 Rue De La Paix.

A room had been reserved, and Brodie signed the register and inquired about the location of the telegraph office. We were then escorted to our room, smaller and modest in comparison to the suite I had stayed in previously.

Yet there was that familiar expression on Brodie's face. It was much like a tortured prisoner as he glanced at the opulence of the furnishings along with the adjoining bathing chamber, as the attendant poured two glasses of fresh water at the table in the small drawing room.

It was quite a contrast to the inn we had stayed in the night before, or even the townhouse at Mayfair.

"It's said that the Duke of Westminster wanted a place for those traveling to and from England that offered the same amenities as those they were familiar with."

"Did he now? It would seem a bit overdone."

"Somewhat more than Old Lodge," I agreed, thinking of my great-aunt's hunting lodge in the north of Scotland where at least a handful of ancestors had retreated for all sorts of hunting and other somewhat nefarious activities. And where the distillery house was for that very fine whisky.

It was a single-story lodge house with rough-hewn timbers, stone walls and slate floors. Thick wool rugs had been added against cold winters, as well as an enormous fireplace in the main room where some warrior ancestor had undoubtedly stood beside the long table while roast deer was served.

One could almost hear tankards being slammed down on that table to call for more ale, or whisky as it were.

We had gone there after a particularly difficult case. It was there that he had proposed. And it was to Old Lodge I had gone these weeks past, alone.

It was a place that had connected us, two very different people. Perhaps too different? And yet...

It was there the night before, in that inn at Calais. Something that I might have dreamed, but wasn't.

There had been no anger, nothing was said. There was only the sound of the wind as it came up around the inn, the hiss of the fire in the fireplace, and we both slept.

"I'll send off a telegram to let Sir Avery know that we arrived." He went to the door.

"Then we should find the address that was in that note."

13 Rue Miron

The Montparnasse

The hotel provided a driver and Brodie gave him the address I had discovered in the note found among the ashes at Sir Collingwood's residence.

In less than an hour, we had made our way along the edge of central Paris and arrived at the Rue Miron.

Number thirteen was a two-story apartment, in a row of other apartments built of brick with white plaster over, the number above the wrought iron-framed entrance.

It was an upper middle-class residence at the edge of the district preferred by writers and artists, with small niche art galleries where struggling artists displayed their work. A place my sister had insisted we visit on days when there were no classes.

"The Montparnasse has several art galleries and cafés where writers and artists gather."

"Know it well, do ye?"

"It was an interesting place to visit when I was able to escape with a handful of others from the Lycée St. Germain."

St. Germain was one of a handful of private girls' schools, attended by the daughters in certain English families, that taught more than acceptable social skills necessary for attracting a husband. It was where our great-aunt had attended as a young woman.

There was history regarding her own adventures there during a time of political unrest with the new Republic having established power throughout France, and an incident with a young patriot who had delivered fresh food to the school.

It was a chance encounter in the dining hall of the school when that young Frenchman decided to adorn a wall with an impassioned slogan that was still heard all over France twenty years after the new Republic was established.

In her own words, "It was a memorable encounter."

Nothing more was ever said of it.

Yet when I had taken myself off to the Greek Isles after that first trip abroad, she had immediately sent someone to return me to London against any possible indiscretion. Someone with dark hair that hung over his collar, and that dark gaze that met mine now.

"Yer past experiences as a school girl? Escaping with a handful of others?" Brodie commented. "Other reckless young girls, no doubt, with no one about."

"I was fifteen years old that year, very near Lily's age. It was one of my first adventures."

Instead of the comment about it being reckless, foolish in the least, he reached around me and seized the lever of the brass Lionhead door-knocker. When there was no response, he tried again.

" What are you doing there?" a voice called out in French from the street.

A woman in the usual dress of a French housekeeper with a shawl around her shoulders, stood on the sidewalk, a shopping basket over her arm.

"We are friends," I replied in French. "We have come to visit."

"Monsieur Dornay is away. He has been gone for several days," she replied, and explained that she worked for the family in an apartment across the street.

She brought fresh fish for him when she went to market. Dornay, she explained gave art lessons to her employer's sons.

I thanked her. She eventually nodded with a curious stare over the shoulder as if I was familiar, then shrugged and continued across the Rue Miron.

An art instructor? And now gone unexpectedly for several days?

Number thirteen Rue Miron had been on that note that someone had burned, obviously with the intention that no one else saw it.

I wondered what we might be able to find inside the apartment. Brodie obviously thought the same.

There was no alleyway or back entrance, only the main entrance at the street.

"Has she returned to her own apartment?" Brodie asked.

"Yes."

"And the street?"

"There is no one about at the moment." Of course, that didn't include anyone who peered out a window of an adjacent apartment.

I could have picked the lock myself. I had become efficient at it, but not nearly as efficient as Brodie. A moment was all that was needed and he had the door open and motioned me inside.

The apartment was typical with the main entrance, a servant's door to one side which undoubtedly led to the kitchen, although there didn't seem to be anyone else about.

There was also small room at the other side that appeared to have been used as a studio for those art lessons the woman had spoken of. Stairs climbed to the second level, where we found a small drawing room with a fireplace, and stairs that led to the third floor with two private rooms.

I had seen such residences, and been inside one that belonged to the family of a student at my school. It had been opulently furnished with carpets, thick drapes on the windows, and furnishings that crowded every room, including a formal dining room.

The apartment at Number Thirteen was quite modest by comparison, with only a minimum of furniture that included a worn settee and overstuffed chair in the drawing room, and a narrow table with chairs for what passed as a dining room in the salon.

The sparse furnishings suggested the owner of the apartment rarely entertained, if at all. And it did seem as if Monsieur Dornay made only a modest living from lessons he gave. Might that have something to do with the address found on that note? If so, what was the connection?

As we had in the past, we each took a floor of the apartment to search more efficiently for anything that might tell us the reason that address had been on the remnants of that note.

As I climbed the stairs, it did seem odd that the drapes had all been left open. Most people who planned to be away were in the habit of closing their drapes.

There was sufficient light from the windows of the apartment that there was no need to turn on the electric, or use the handheld lamp Brodie usually carried when we made inquiries in a case. It made the search for anything amiss or revealing that much easier.

Brodie had inspected the ground-floor kitchen which revealed there was almost no food in the cold box, and then the small studio on the ground floor. He continued at the second-floor parlor and salon, while I climbed the stairs to the third-floor private rooms.

I entered the first room. The furnishings here were even more sparse and included only a bed and a chair. There was no wardrobe, only hooks along the wall which oddly held a coat, a jacket, several woolen scarves, and an umbrella.

I searched the pockets of the coat and jacket, then around the bed and under the bed, and found nothing. There was no desk or table in this room, therefore little else to search.

A door in the far wall led to a narrow bathroom. Here towels had been left about and there was what seemed a musty smell with no window. A door at the other end very likely connected to that second room on the floor.

What passed for a bathroom, what was called a ‘salle de bain' in France, had a clawfoot tub, badly stained basin, and commode.

Here again, there were a few personal items that included a hairbrush—the sort Brodie used—along with a bottle of hair tonic, and a straight-edged razor. All of which a man would usually take with him for time away.

There was a peculiar musty smell, no doubt due to the towel that lay on the floor where it had obviously been tossed aside. Men, it seemed, according to mentions from my sister when she was previously married or my great-aunt with one of her side comments, were not particularly concerned with such things as hanging up their clothes or a towel after bathing.

Except Brodie, I had discovered. He was quite orderly when it came to his long coat or the few other clothes that he had, no doubt from having few possessions as a boy on the street, nor a roof over his head, as I had learned from Munro.

Brodie was not one to go on about such things. Learning anything about him in the beginning had been like attempting to pry a bone from the hound and frequently had ended with him—Brodie not the hound—simply waving off my question.

"It's not somethin' to concern yerself with," he had told me several times, but it did concern me.

Perhaps now more than ever. With this distance between us I needed to understand. His history, the things that had mattered to him, the good and bad.

I supposed that it was the writer in me, or possibly my own history that drove this need. The past, as I knew only too well, made us who we were.

It became obvious, early in my association with him, that I realized the man he became—honest, true, someone I could trust—was in spite of the horrible years of his youth... Almost in spite of them, I thought as I searched the bathroom.

Other than those few personal items and that discarded towel, I found nothing more in the bathroom that might tell me anything and continued through to that adjoining room.

This room had obviously been the artist's private studio where he worked on his own projects when not teaching young students.

Monsieur Dornay obviously preferred to work with oils. There was a shelf on the near wall with tubes of paints, a variety of brushes set on end in a chipped porcelain vase to dry. And the ever-present jar of pungent-smelling liquid—turpentine for cleaning those brushes, as I knew so well from my sister's artistic efforts.

There was a table, hardly in better shape than the one in the dining room below. A vase of withered flowers that might possibly have been a subject for a painting stood on the wooden surface, along with other tools for the artist's work that included several well-used cloths, a square-tipped blade, and a knife. Possibly for creating an effect from particularly thick paint a brush could not achieve, as I had seen my sister do on one of her pieces.

There was also a great deal of trash and rubbish scattered around the room, wadded up artist's paper for drafting subjects before beginning a piece with oils, along with a shattered wine glass and a decanter, the corner of the table stained with the contents.

My sister knew far more about these things that I did, and had explained that artists could be a temperamental lot. It was not unusual for those she had visited, and one in particular who had provided lessons, to explode in a burst of temper at some trivial matter.

Much like a temperamental Scot?

The thought was there and then immediately gone as a memory of the night before returned.

There had been nothing temperamental or angry when I had wakened and Brodie was there beside the bed, his fingers brushing mine. Then the expression on his face as he stared down at my hand in his. Tears had stung in my eyes as I held on and then felt his weight beside me and his warmth surround me. Protecting me?

I took a deep breath and continued my search of the atelier. Amid the smell of paint and turpentine, that smell I experienced in the bathroom was much stronger.

Across the room were several easels of partial and completed works, some draped with canvas. I pulled the canvas back from the nearest one and uncovered a portrait of a young girl with dark hair and blue eyes made all the brilliant by the flowers she held in her hand.

It was a simple painting with only the girl and the sweet expression on her face. But the beauty of it was in the simplicity.

Someone who lived nearby, the daughter of a friend, or perhaps the artist's child?

I had seen nothing else in my search to indicate that a child lived there.

Lowering the canvas back into place, I carefully stepped around other piles of rubbish including a small barrel that had toppled over, and almost tripped over the artist's stool that lay on its side. A body lay alongside it.

I had found the source of that smell, strong, tightening the back of my throat as I clasped a hand to my face.

It's one thing to prepare oneself for the sight at a morgue or funeral, quite another to come upon one unaware and then very nearly step on it.

I heard a muffled sound and I realized that I was the one who made it—startled at my discovery, unprepared for the pool of dried blood that surrounded it, and the ghastly expression on the man's face with eyes wide open.

"What is it? Have ye found something?" Brodie called from the adjacent room, and then he was there.

"Mikaela?"

He found me in that room, then stepped past, going down on one knee beside the body as he had undoubtedly done dozens of times when he was with the MET, and obviously in our private work.

The usual sort of question—Is he dead? Obviously, a moot point. The man was very dead.

"Monsieur Dornay?" I finally recovered enough to say.

"It would seem," Brodie replied. He looked up at me.

"Are ye all right?"

I nodded. "I wasn't expecting a body among the rubbish. Next time, I'll be better prepared." I could have sworn one corner of his mouth curved upward, then quickly disappeared.

"Did ye find anything else?"

I shook my head. "It does seem that there might have been a confrontation in this room."

He looked about, taking in everything in the atelier in a sweeping glance.

"Did you find anything?"

"There was little food in the kitchen. If the woman we saw brought food from market, there was no sign of it. It did seem, however, that someone had eaten in the parlor and there was a half-full bottle of wine."

"A last meal for Monsieur Dornay?"

Brodie shook his head. "There were two plates and two glasses with red color on the rim of one."

A guest? Angeline Cotillard had worn vivid red lip color.

"The same shade we found on that cigarette at Sandringham?"

"It appears so," he replied as he proceeded to search the pockets of the man's vest, the shirt, and then turned him over so that he could search the pockets of his trousers.

I had seen all of this before. Still, a dead body was a gruesome sight even if the person hadn't been stabbed to death, which Monsieur Dornay obviously had.

It was the sound the body made, that release of air from the lungs as the chemist Mr. Brimley had once explained, that could be quite startling. As if the man might simply get to his feet and then carry on a conversation.

Brodie held up a piece of paper.

"You found something?"

He handed it to me then continued his search of the last of the pockets that revealed nothing, then proceeded to remove the artist's boots and search them as well.

"Aye, just as I thought," he announced as he removed a thick roll of currency from one of the boots.

"A considerable amount of money, and all of it is in English notes."

Payment of some sort? For what? One of those paintings? That seemed unlikely based on what I had seen in the room.

Dornay was quite talented, but he was no Rembrandt or Cézanne. Yes, even I knew the difference between. Although that was as far as it went.

What I did know by the condition of the room and the rest of the apartment was that Monsieur Dornay apparently struggled financially as so many artists did. It was difficult to find an audience, much less those who would pay considerable sums for a piece of art.

"The papers I handed ye?"

I unfolded one of them and read the information printed in French. "They're travel papers."

He stood, finished with his search. "For where?"

"Brussels, and there is a handbill for an art exhibit of several French Masters to be given at the Royal Museum there."

"When?"

"The twentieth through the twenty-first."

The twentieth of the month was two days from now. It did seem by those travel papers and the handbill that Dornay had hoped to attend.

We now knew more than when we arrived in Paris, yet I wondered what more we might have learned if Monsieur Dornay was alive.

A sound, muffled and somewhat distant beyond the windows, brought me back to the present and the fact that Brodie and I, who had no right to be here and in fact had more or less broken into a dead man's apartment, were in somewhat of a precarious position that could be difficult to explain.

"It is the gendarme. "

"The police."

I nodded. It was safe to assume that the housekeeper from across the street had seen us enter the apartment and then notified them. It hardly mattered now. We couldn't risk being found here.

Any explanation would require contact with London, and I knew from experience that could be a lengthy process. The much larger issue was whether or not Sir Avery would even acknowledge that he had sent us, much less provide for our release.

"We canna be found here," Brodie came to the same conclusion. "Bring the papers. We need to leave before they come up here."

There are some things that are easier said than done.

"There is only the front entrance," I reminded him as sounds came again from the first floor.

That dark gaze went to the large windows at the wall.

"Do you have a plan?" I inquired.

He nodded. "I seem to remember that ye escaped a burning church by way of the roof.

The ‘church' was in fact a brothel in Edinburgh where we first met Lily.

I looked at those large windows. "Do you intend for us to escape over the rooftops?"

The next sound brought our attention back to the situation at hand, most definitely the sound of others now inside the apartment on the ground floor.

I looked out onto the slanted roof of the apartment building behind the one at Number Thirteen. The building I now stared at was no more than three stories tall and that slanted roof was twenty or more feet below.

"How do you propose that we…?" I got no further with the question as I turned around.

Brodie had pulled most of the canvas and several drop cloths from Dornay's paintings and was presently tying them together end-to-end. He looked up.

"Unless ye wish to await the police and explain the situation to them."

I gave him a look he was most familiar with.

"Aye, ye might grab the cloth from that painting."

I didn't care to wait for the French police. They seemed to have a particular dislike for English citizens in spite of the travelers that passed through and spent a great deal of money here. We had been warned about that dislike years before at the school my sister and I attended.

I seized the nearest drop cloth and pulled it from the painting it covered to reveal a nude painting in progress.

There was enough ‘in progress' to make out all the intimate parts as the model reclined on a settee. She was quite robust with long blonde hair that draped around her ample parts.

Brodie appeared with that trail of canvas and linen in hand. He handed me one end of the canvas rope he'd made.

"Come along now unless ye wish to greet the police at the door."

He climbed up onto the wide window casement as if it was something he did every day and I was reminded that he hadn't always been with the police. He held out his hand and pulled me up beside him.

He tied one of the ‘ropes' he had made to the iron frame of the window, then tested his weight against it. With a nod, he turned and then dropped the loop that he tied at the long end over my head and then under my arms as he explained that he was going to lower me to that roof below, then follow.

"Yer not going to argue about it?"

More sounds came from inside the apartment, much closer now.

"Perhaps when we have more time," I replied.

He shook his head, then held onto me as I climbed out the window. He slowly lowered me to the adjacent rooftop. But instead of pulling it back up, he climbed out onto the narrow ledge, then quickly lowered himself down beside me.

"You have done this before," I commented.

"Perhaps," he replied.

He immediately crossed the roof to the front of the building, then returned across the narrow edge of that slanted roof, much like a cat in spite of his height. Of course, he was not that tall as a lad in Edinburgh and then London.

Cat burglar, I thought.

"Watch yer footing," he cautioned as he took hold of my gloved hand and we crossed the roof together, like two cats.

There was a drainpipe for the runoff of rain on the near corner. It ran down the side of the building to the street below.

"The pipe runs past the balcony at the apartment below, then down to the street." He took hold of the pipe with both hands. "It should hold."

"Wait…" I cautioned. "I'm fairly certain that I weigh less. Perhaps I should go first, to test it."

That dark gaze met mine. "If it holds me, it will be safe for ye."

And with that, he began the climb down.

Bloody stubborn man, I thought. Secured by metal brackets, the pipe held as he descended to that balcony, hand over hand. He reached the edge of the balcony, climbed over the railing, then looked up.

A cat, indeed!

I had climbed trees in Scotland and at Sussex Square as a child, usually successfully, and on occasion in my work with Brodie. That hot air balloon came to mind along with the ‘church' in Edinburgh.

However, never down a drainpipe with the French police undoubtedly about to enter that top floor atelier and discover Monsieur Dornay's body.

I took hold of the pipe as Brodie had, grateful that I had worn gloves, and began that descent, and silently cursed women's fashion even with the split skirt I was wearing along the way.

I found a toe-hold on the bracket below the one at the roofline as he had, held on and lowered myself until I reached the next bracket, and the next until I felt a strong grip on one leg then at my waist.

I was lifted over the railing of the balcony and let go of the pipe. He pulled me to him, arm around my waist, his other hand clasping my head.

My hair had come undone in our escape from the other apartment. There was that dark gaze, myself quite breathless from the dangerous climb down the drainpipe, the length of him pressed against me.

And I thought it was very possible that Michaelangelo's statue of David, considered quite risqué, had nothing over Angus Brodie.